The Eclipse Viewer – Episode 48 – Kenji Mizoguchi’s Fallen Women [Part 2]

Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:08:54 — 32.1MB)

This podcast focuses on Criterion’s Eclipse Series of DVDs. Hosts David Blakeslee and Trevor Berrett give an overview of each box and offer their perspectives on the unique treasures they find inside. In this episode, David and Trevor is joined by Scott Nye to discuss Eclipse Series 13: Kenji Mizoguchi’s Fallen Women.

About the films:

Over the course of a three-decade, more than eighty film career, master cineaste Kenji Mizoguchi (Ugetsu, Sansho the Bailiff) would return again and again to one abiding theme: the plight of women in Japanese society. In these four lacerating works of social consciousness—two prewar (Osaka Elegy, Sisters of the Gion), two postwar (Women of the Night, Street of Shame)—Mizoguchi introduces an array of compelling female protagonists, crushed or resilient, who are forced by their conditions and culture into compromising positions. With Mizoguchi’s visual daring and eloquence, these films are as cinematically thrilling as they are politically rousing.

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Episode Links

Kenji Mizoguchi

• Criterion Explore
• Film Reference
• IndieWire
• I Shoot the Pictures
• Madman Entertainment
• New York Times
• Observations on Film Art
• Strictly Film School

Box Set Reviews

• Classic Art Films
• Los Angeles Times
• UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies

Women of the Night

• David’s Journey Through the Eclipse Series review
• Criterion Confessions
• Film Sufi
• New Yorker

Street of Shame

• David’s Journey Through the Eclipse Series review
• Criterion Confessions
• Electric Sheep
• Film Sufi
• Japan Times
• New Yorker
• New York Times (1959)
• Senses of Cinema
• Wonders in the Dark

Next time on the podcast: Eclipse Series 2: The Documentaries of Louis Malle

Contact us

• Twitter
• Email: theeclipseviewer (at) gmail.com
• David Blakeslee ( Twitter / Website )
• Trevor Berrett ( Twitter / Website )
• Scott Nye ( Twitter / Website )